Anna Hetzer is a German poet born in 1986. Alongside with publications in magazines and anthologies, she has published two collections of poetry: Zwischen den prasselnden Punkten (Verlagshaus Berlin, 2016) und Stempelkissenbuch (Sukultur 2017). She joined the Berlin poetry group G13 in 2011. Moreover she regularly works together with composers and fine-artists. Anna Hetzer lives and works in Berlin.

For the past five years, Ícaro Lira has been analysing the implications and the development of political and historical acts of Brazilian history through documental works, archivist, archeological and fiction. His exhibitions present similar structures to ‘museums’, reuniting several forgotten fragments, and producing a system of objects which articulates artistic and non-artistic materials and a set of actions, not necessarily confined to an artistic object, but scattered in exhibitions, books, studios, debates, walks etc.

Icaro Lira’s Museu do Estrangeiro (Foreigner’s Museum, 2015-18), for example, is an ongoing project the artist is collaborating on with refugees and immigrants in the city of São Paulo. It’s part of his Ethnographic Expeditions in Fiction, which has already taken several artists to work at the site of one of the bloodiest civil wars in Brazilian History, the Canudos War (1895-1897), a bloodshed imortalized in one of the canonical works of Brazilian Literatura, ‘Os Sertões’ (1902), by Euclides da Cunha, released recently by Penguin Books in a new translation. For the 3rd Biennale of Bahia, among the group of artists and researchers he invited were the curator Beatriz Lemos and the artist Paulo Nazareth.

Renata Scovino introduced an interview with the artist about the project “Desterro” (Exile): “In the project ‘Desterro – Exile Project’ Ícaro Lira develops a research in the field of visual arts which seeks interdisciplinary partnerships in sociology, anthropology and archeology. His work includes several actions that start from the need to stay in the place of investigation. The search in the archives of the institutions, the cohabitation and the interviews with local residents, as well as notes, drawings, diaries, videos and photos. All feeds his project. It can be said that the work of Ícaro questions the notion of art which separates the process and the documentation. He goes way beyond that, since, for the artist it’s not enough to collect material and replicate museum procedures. The work of Ícaro Lira is based on the archive as a possibility of redemption of the past, is not the mere recognition of an event that interests, but a kind of knowledge that opens to empty, absences and oblivion.”

Ícaro Lira – “Exiles

He would come to say in that interview with Renata Scovino:

Ícaro Lira: “My first contact with Canudos was with the Glauber Rocha film and then with the book Sertões by Euclides da Cunha. Antonio Conselheiro is from Quixeramobim in the central backwoods of Ceará – my home state – and I always had a very close contact with his image. I worked initially with materials from the National Library (in Rio), Joaquim Nabuco Foundation (Recife) and Bahia Public Archive (within the Bahia Biennial). My research proceeds fundamentally on the fields with the locals, with the survivors and their descendants. I consider all my work as a single body, a continuous research on forced migration movements. I try not to put things in frames, works are open ideas and their formalization in the museum or gallery also follows this path. There is no final form, but an ever-changing process.”

Ícaro Lira – Museu do Estrangeiro (Foreigner’s Museum)

Brazilian novelist Lima Barreto (1881-1922), who unmasked the Brazilian hypocrisies towards race and the blatant racism in the first years of the Republic, in a picture taken when he was first committed to a mental institution in 1909.

(set of racial denominations used in Brazil to describe various skin colour tones)

Ícaro Lira,​ was born in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 1986. In 2013 Icaro received the IPHAN Art and Heritage Honor Award, National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute. In 2014 he participated of 3rd Biennial of Bahia with the work “Desterro, Ethnographic Expedition of Fiction”. In 2017 participates of Rumos Itaú Cultural with the project Expedition Catastrophe: for an Archeology of Ignorance And in 2017 of the 20th Festival of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil at SESC Pompéia in São Paulo-SP.

He has held individual exhibitions at the Paço das Artes (SP), Cultural Center Oswald de Andrade (SP), Central Gallery (SP), IBEU Gallery (RJ), Centro Cultural Banco do Nordeste (Fortaleza-CE) and SESC (Crato-CE). In the last years, he has participated in art residencies in Brazil and Latin America, among them Capacete Entertainments (RJ), Terra UNA (MG), Instituto Sacatar (BA), Red Bull Station (SP), VATELÓN (Soriano, Uruguay) and LA ENE Aires, (Argentina). He lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

Cabaret Wittgenstein present today two pieces by Austrian poet, performer and producer Oskar May: the soundpiece “Poof! The Captain!”, followed by the text piece “Traktionen” (in the German original) and its English reconstruction as “Tractions”.

Oskar May is an Austrian poet, performer and producer born in 1991. He has released the EP ‘The Lane’ (Gully Havoc, 2016) and is part of the Philosophy Unbound collective. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Pisternak (1976-2011) was an exceptionally gifted child. His intelligence was matched only by his melancholy. He, at the age of 14, became the youngest ever member of the “Sovetskaya Kosmicheskaya Programma” or Soviet Space Program. What follows is an extract from Dr. Vladimir Vladimirovna’s official psychological report (see Notes: 1) on Pisternak’s entry to the program.

Pisternak started thinking about love when he was a boy. Back then, in the eighties, love was just beginning. It attracted a certain type of people, enthusiastic people. He spent the whole summer studying the science of it “beneath a container of explosive hydrogen”.

(Findings)

Love is thin and shiny
Love is dark and slippery
Love keeps the cost down
Love is not trying to be cagey
Love is clean and drinkable
Love is burning money
Love is a heart attack
Love could be quite a big thing
Love is the north-pole and the south-pole in one go
Love is a big accident
Love is clean-shaven with dimples
Love is normal, absolutely normal
Love is a self-delusional process
Love is maybe two years
Love is a remote region in Siberia
Love is the Malaysian tourism board
Love needs proof you can deliver
Love is a bird named Tim.
Love cannot do nothing else
Love is the 1984 Paralympic games
Love is Germany and its allies
Love hovers somewhere and waits
Love can deliver cargo faster than an ocean liner
Love may not be right for you
Love is about 50 feet longer than a Boeing 747
Love sends you kisses and champagne
Love is being built in Bedford, England
Love has about a thousand private shareholders
Love is Europe’s largest indoor waterpark.

In 2005, at the age of twenty-nine, Pisternak brought love to the United States. He knew no English, but he did know love. He rented an office in New York City, hired a translator, and proclaimed himself an American lover but he found no customers.

Pisternak’s translator was a young aeronautical student of New York University named Nikita Panamerenko (see Notes: 2). Nikita and Pisternak were close friends. Despite this they regularly argued, usually about the subject of love. In Pisternak’s words, kindly translated by Nikita, “He is world leading expert in love”. The second topic on which they rarely agreed was Physics or as Pisternak referred to it “The science of youth”. This subject interested Nikita. He would talk at great length about what he called “Verticalism”, or man’s obsession with anything that “reaches for the stars”. Pisternak dismissed this roundly as “pseudo-academic jargon”. What follows is a transcribed extract from a conversation held in Pisternak’s office on 36th Street Astoria, Queens, April 19th, 2008.

Pisternak holds forth
That surely it must be
That the earth surrounds the sky
And not the other
As believed by his bookish
And wrong-headed colleague.

“He puts his faith in science, this is the problem.
Too much testing, too much rigor.
He forgets his craft.
The science of youth, that’s all it is.
One must feel a theory.
Hold a buttercup to its chin; bounce it on one’s knee
Before letting it loose in the forest of thought.
Proof never proved anything.
It simply greases the gears
Of those who lack imagination.”

Our next meeting would happen more than a year later due in part to Pisternak’s legal status in the United States (see Notes: 3). In this interval period Nikita had encouraged Pisternak to broaden his interests. As Nikita confided in me “The more time he is here the more time he is mad”. Pisternak had begun attending poetry workshop held at the local Russian community centre. He informed me, through our faithful translator, that he is now “world leading expert in subject”. The following passage, taken from his notebook, makes up part of a short lecture he had been asked to give in the summer of 2010 at Harvard University (see Notes: 4)

Note 3: See Pisternak vs The State of New York, 2009.
Note 4: This claim has never been independently verified by any faculty member at Harvard University.

(III)

Of course it is very difficult to pin point when poetry was first produced. A number of technological advances contributed to its conception but it is widely regarded to have begun on January 21st 1962 at The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. At the height of the cold war the Kremlin felt it necessary to create a form of literature impervious to radiation.

Early critics suggested that poetry would become a menace to all western countries. The director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover, commented that, “The menace of poetry in this country will remain a menace until the American people make themselves aware of the techniques of poetry. No one who truly understands what it really is can be taken in by it”.

The second major date came on July 20th 1969 when the USA successfully landed the poet Neil Armstrong on the moon. The opening line of his “moon poem” is one of the most well known in the field.

“One small step for a poet, one giant leap for poetry”
unfortunately the transmission cut out and the rest was lost to history.

In 1972 the poetic technician Roy Tomlinson introduced the first standard poetry format using the line space to separate the title of the poem with the poem itself, this would become know as P-mail.

Much of the 70s and 80s was characterized by ideological differences in poetic practice the world over. The intervention of American poets only ever made things worse.

Fast-forward to 1994 and the channel tunnel opened between England and France. This was a turning point for cross channel poetry, making it possible for a poem to be written in London at breakfast and read in Paris by lunch.

In the year leading up to the millennium, fear of the Y2K bug gripped the world of poetry. A suspected glitch in the system of electronic typewriters led people to believe that all poetry written pre 2000 would be lost on the stroke of midnight. Many people spent the months leading up to the millennium stockpiling poetry, which in turn lead to a great poetry surplus during the first months of the year 2000.

As of 2002 most E.U. countries adopt the Poem as their currency in a bid to ease trade across national borders. Britain declined to join its European cousins in the new currency due to the arrogant view that its poetry was of a higher value than that of other countries.

In 2009 the USA elected its first poet president, Barack Obama.

Starting in 2010 the biggest poetry crises the world has ever known takes full affect, due in large part to the irresponsible actions of poets working in the financial sector.

For Pisternak poetry was a private hobby. He never read his work in public. After he was eaten, myself and Nikita searched his notebooks, which mainly consisted of technical drawings (see Notes: 5) but could find little in the way of poetry, although neither of us profess to have any aptitude for the subject. We did find a short passage, which does appear to have at least some poetic qualities.

Take my hand it is made as yours is out
of bones and hand take my voice, toss it in
sleep as your own, variously you have
known me and in degrees I have known you
also walking here and now as far from the
world As we are and thinking this makes us
close In the fold of love that you say is
naught But tricks and light and still we go on
like this talking or not talking which is fine. Now what about this poem then? It’s 10 lines already and you haven’t said anything you think that’s clever but it isn’t its just words and we can all say that your words ain’t clever. 11 lines now probably, is anyone counting? Probably not, we can ask at the end. The poem can’t write itself and if it can then why are you holding the pen? 13 lines now, goodness! How can you go on pretending? We already agreed that the words you use are all wrong and what about this poem then? Somewhere in the region of 16 lines I guess.

Our final meeting occurred on the 24th of October 2011 in the Apshawa nature reserve, New Jersey State. We had planned a days hiking with the intention of ruminating on the article “Pan-romanticism in the Atomic Age” (see Notes: 6). Nikita and Pisternak were deep in conversation on man’s need for, as Pisternak phrased it ,”transitional space” when suddenly a 300lb black bear (see Notes: 7) snatched him from behind. The following is a transcribed recording from my Dictaphone, and to my utmost regret, Pisternak’s last words.

Bear! Unhand me from your mouth
And you will see
That we are not dissimilar
In wit and irony.
You are mainly of fur
,Which I intend to release you from,
As you intend to release me from my skin.
Think of us here and now, naked
In our lovers’ embrace.
Then think of your poor mother,
how upset she would be,
And your father,
He worked himself furless
For you
Now go home,
Let this not be the end for me,
But the beginning for us.
I love you bear.

§

James Proctor was born in North Shields, England, in 1987. He studied first in Liverpool before moving to London, where he lived in Cable Street Studios, one of the main creative hubs of East London. It was here that he co-founded and hosted the now legendary Cable Street Electric open mic. This is where the performative aspect of his work began to take shape. After three years of living in London he moved to Barcelona where he continued writing and performing, often in collaboration with American poet Ed Smallfield. Back in England, he went to Newcastle University where he studied for a Master’s degree in Creative Writing. He has been published by Verse Kraken Magazine, Kozmosis and Noise Medium. He self publishes the majority of his work on his website jamesproctorpoetry.co.uk. James Proctor lives and works in Berlin.

The following are excerpts from Nils Christian Moe-Repstad’s ‘Wunderkammer (27 catalogues)’, which is a systemic book of poetry, consisting of 742 three line poems, divided into 27 titled catalogues over 848 pages, and built upon the mathematical “Mandelbrotset”. Translated by Ren Powell.

§

The Norwegian poet Nils Christian Moe-Repstad is the author of nine collections and collaborated with the musicians Nils Petter Molvær, Eivind Aarset, Jan Bang and Erik Honoré on the 2013 album Teori om det eneste (Theory of the Singular). His most recent collection, Wunderkammer (27 catalogues), has been nominated for the Brage Prize and the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature.

We post here four poems by Adelaide Ivánova, out of her début collection O Martelo (“The Hammer“), translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels. The volume was originally published in Portugal in 2016 on Douda Correria, and was recently released in Brazil by Editora Garupa.

Four poems by Adelaide Ivánova
translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels

the visit

how many moths
spiders lice
and other beasts
infest inhabit
the visitor’s mattress
Humboldt never went to get
faking forgetfulness
after it was too late
and we were way too
in love to go get
the visitor’s mattress
in the garret
so we made do with this

how many moths
spiders lice
and other beasts
in another accursed
mattress they witnessed
another mattress
another visit
the quick start
the violence
the blood
good blood no
there was arrival
and then silence

because of sand web dust
moss mold spider
i jumped to the other
bed other beasts
before had inhabited me
already ants
mites pisceans
fleas only
moths and Humboldt
didn’t screw me

years before the curse
though sand web dust
i could never again
leave that bed
there are beasts less trustworthy
than moths there’s the hyena
fish snake scabies
if there are 2 on the mattress
for 1 visitor there will
always be one who is not
innocent.
§

the cat

the official didn’t take me seriously
in the least and she asked me all slick
did i really want to open
an investigation she was wearing a
wonderfully awful outfit
pants and blouse
jeans on jeans
after reading through the papers
the official made me think of janus
the roman king with two faces and
the cat with two faces who
died at 15 it’s rare
for a cat like that to live so long
yet the official lives on in her little outfit
jeans on janus.

§

the sow

the clerk is a person
and she’s curious just
like all persons are curious
she asks me why i drank so
much i don’t answer but i
know people drink to die
only not to die a lot
she asks me why didn’t i
scream since i wasn’t
gagged i don’t answer but i know
we’re all born with the gag
the clerk in her starched
white shirt
is an excellent officer and
typist she reminds me so much
of a song
of an animal i can’t remember which.

§

the vulture

corpus delicti is
the expression used
when law is breached and
traces of the fact of a crime
are left making the body a
place and of the crime an
adjective the examination
consists of seeing and being
seen (parties also
consist of these)

lying on a gurney with
four doctors around me talking
about mucous membranes the strike
the lack of disposable cups
and deciding in front of my open
legs if after work should they
all go to the bar or what?
the doctor from the institute
of legal medicine wrote his report
not looking at my face
talking on his cell phone

me and the doctor have a body
and at least two other things in common:
we both love talking on the phone
and going to the bar
the doctor is a person
he deals with dead men
and living women
(he calls them pieces of
evidence).

§

Adelaide Ivánova (b. 1982 in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil) is a Brazilian journalist, photographer, writer, and translator. Her first two books are autonomy (São Paulo, Pingado-Prés, 2014), and Polaróides (Recife, Césarea, 2014). Her work has been shown in Brazil, Argentina, the US, Germany, France, and Spain, and is in the collections of L’arthotèque (Brest, France) and Kunst Dieselkraftwerk (Cottbus, Germany). Her writing, translations, and photographs have been published in journals like i-D (UK), Colors (Italy), The Huffington Post (US), Modo de Usar & Co. (Brazil), Suplemento Pernambuco (Brazil), Der Greif (Germany), Vogue and Marie Claire (Brazil), Ojo de Pez (Spain), and Vision (China), among others. She lives and works between Cologne and Berlin.